It is Friday night and I am working to get this post published. Tomorrow is the start of all the big college football games. I am excited to watch my Georgia Bulldogs. They are mine…… not because I graduated from there but because I grew up in Atlanta and cheered for them since 1976. Truth be told I would have gone there but it was not financially an option. I am also trying to get excited to cheer for LSU. I am 60 and have never been on their side but my daughter is there now. She is excited for SEC sports and I want them to have a good season for her. College GameDay will be filming at LSU at six in the morning and watching is my way of still feeling with her despite our 2,000-mile difference. Three items for you.
Mortgage rates went the wrong way
The United States and Iran exchanged fire last weekend. Oil jumped to about $90 a barrel. And then something happened that surprises most people.
Mortgage rates went up.
By Monday the 30-year rate was 6.875 percent, the highest since June of 2025. That is 12 basis points higher than the Thursday before, which is a little more than a tenth of a percentage point in four days.
Here is why that is backwards. When a war starts, investors usually get nervous and buy government bonds because bonds are considered safe. More buyers means the government does not have to pay as much interest to attract them, so yields fall. Mortgage rates follow those yields down. That is what happened in 2003, and again in 2020, and again in 2023.
This time investors did the opposite. They looked at oil at $90 and thought about inflation instead of safety. Higher oil means higher prices for everything that has to be shipped, which means the Federal Reserve is more likely to raise interest rates rather than lower them. So investors sold bonds instead of buying them. Yields went up.
If any of this does not make sense to you, I explained what a Treasury bond and a yield actually are last week, and the longer version of why mortgage rates follow the 10-year rather than the Fed is in Why Your Mortgage Rate Doesn’t Move When the Fed Does.
Last week I mentioned that the 10-year started this year near 4.20 percent. It closed Friday at 4.784 percent. That move has not stopped.
This is not only happening in America, it is happening all over the world. Germany’s 10-year bond hit its highest level since 2011 this week. Japan’s went above three percent for the first time since 1996. Britain’s hit a level not seen since 2008. All in the same few days.
Governments everywhere borrowed enormous amounts of money when money was nearly free. That debt comes due and has to be replaced at whatever rate exists today. If you have ever had an adjustable rate loan reset on you, it is the same thing, just with a country instead of a household.
One more piece, and this one is from the ground rather than from a chart. I still know people from my years doing home loans. A branch manager I worked with sends rate updates to his team, and this week he wrote that there is no way to sugar coat it, rates are just down right nasty right now. Then he said something I did not expect. Buyer demand is still high, and this is the first buyers market he has seen in years.
Think about what that means if you have been sitting on the sidelines waiting for rates to come down. The rate got worse. Your negotiating position got better. Those are two different things and only one of them shows up in the headlines.
That is one desk in the Southern California market, not the whole country. But it is worth knowing that the thing everyone is watching is not the only thing that moved.
A number I wrote about last month turned out to be wrong
In the Weekly Notes post for August 8, 2026, I wrote that the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July. The market rallied to a record that day because a weak job market makes a Federal Reserve rate increase less likely.
This Friday, September 4, 2026, the new jobs report came out. In addition to sharing the latest numbers, the prior jobs report was revised. July did not lose 23,000 jobs. It added 21,000. That is a swing of 44,000 in the opposite direction. June was revised up as well, by 11,000. Together the summer months came in 55,000 better than first reported.
I want to be clear that I was not wrong and neither was anyone else. That was the number the government published. It is the number every outlet reported and the number the market traded on. It has since been replaced.
Government economic data comes out fast and then gets corrected as more complete information arrives. The first version moves markets. The correction arrives a month later on a quiet afternoon and almost nobody notices.
So when you see a headline built on an economic report, understand that you are looking at an early estimate, not a final number. That does not mean ignore it but certainly take it with a grain of salt.
For the record, August payrolls came in at 162,000 against expectations of about 53,000. Three times what economists were looking for, and the best month since March. Unemployment held at 4.1 percent.
Stocks fell on the news. Good news about jobs makes a rate increase more likely. That is the exact mirror of what happened four weeks ago, when bad news pushed stocks to a record.
Why none of this changes what I own
Look at what this week actually contained. Missiles. Oil at $90. Mortgage rates at their highest in over a year. The 10-year Treasury at a level not seen since 2023, closing Friday at 4.784 percent. A big rebound on Wednesday. A jobs report at three times expectations on Friday.
Every one of those days gave you a reason to do something.
The S&P 500 finished the week down less than one percent.
Five days of alarms and the market ended up roughly where it started. This is what noise looks like. It is loud, it is constant, it is genuinely interesting to read about, and almost none of it is a reason to change what you own.
The war will end one day, God willing. Mortgage rates will come down one day. Over long stretches of time the market has gone up, and that is not a hopeful opinion, it is what the record shows.
But I want to be careful here, because the honest version of this advice has a condition attached. If you are 75 years old and you need that money in 12 months, none of what I just said applies to you. A person who has to sell soon does not have time to wait out a bad stretch. That is a completely different situation and it deserves a completely different answer.
I turned 60 last month. There is a school of thought that says I should be getting conservative now. I understand the argument and I do not dismiss it. But I do not need to touch that money any time soon, which means I have time to sit through the ups and downs. When I am 70, I believe with a high degree of confidence that those balances will be higher than they are today.
That is not a prediction about next week. I have no idea what next week holds. It is a statement about what happens to patient money over 10 years, and that is the only timeframe where I am willing to have an opinion.
Blessings Come From the Worst of Times.
See you next Saturday.
Christopher
Weekly Notes — August 29, 2026